Small Space, Big Style Shoot

Back in the office. It was a long day of sitting in a dark studio in Maryland yesterday, shooting clips for HGTV's upcoming show, Small Space, Big Style.

After makeup at 7:30 and a lot of strong coffee, I was sat down in a chair in front of an HD TV camera, shown nearly 40 different small houses and asked to comment and otherwise give "expert" commentary on each of them.... immediately. The shooting day ended at 5:30. It was a whirlwind.

While it is incredibly hard to comment in an interesting and articulate way on spaces you have never been in and have only just seen, it was very cool to tour so many homes. Every one was under 1000 sq. ft. (small by US standards), and located in either Texas, New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco. And they varied widely.

There was an 86 sq. ft. home that was a beautiful, little shingled house on wheels that was lived in by a fellow whose fiance refused to move in with him, so he was building her one next door. There was a 800 sq. ft., two story, 7ft wide house that was totally decked out in luxury (read - pied a terre). There was a 500 sq. ft. apartment in which the owner refused to have any furniture besides a bed and one chair (which was an art object). He sat, read and ate on the floor.

There was a beautiful tiny one bedroom in Chelsea where a young couple had built a large four poster bed inside the smallest room and hung a soft chandelier down through the canopy to light the bed. The walls were all colored eggshshell colors and the moldings were so bad that they had painted out beyond the moldings @ 4" - creating straight lines and thick molding effect. Very nice. Oh, and they had a 6 month old baby AND it was a 5 floor walk-up. Ouch.

There were far more - including the couple that had a large taxidermy collection and a steel plate for a rug in their bedroom, OH, and the guy whose bedroom was painted to look like the inside of a Egyptian tomb....

While we don't know what the show will look like yet, we suspect that it will be a winner. It simply shows you so much and gives you so many ideas without all the makover business. You can look out for it in August/September. MGR